READERS FORUM: THE WATER MAGE'S DAUGHTER: A NOVEL OF LOVE, MAGIC AND WAR IN VERSE

CHAIR OF CLASSICS AT LOYOLA RAVES!

Professor Martha C. Taylor, Chair of Classics at Loyola University Maryland has posted a review on Amazon.  Here's what she writes:

"In this extraordinary verse novel, author McKenzie Bodkin has written a modern-day epic set in a medieval-like world of demons, ogres, young love and magic. To his enormous credit, Mr. Bodkin’s verse works. He uses three different rhyme schemes in the three large canticles of the song, while using an 8-beat line (or iambic tetrameter) throughout, and as he describes it in the introduction, the rhythmic rhyming lines soon work their own magic on the reader and create a hypnotic  attachment to the story. The verse does not get in the way of the plot, rather, one delights in reading it, not least to marvel at the clever effects Mr. Bodkin creates. Here is a fine example from Canticle III, Canto XXVII:

“When of our true and chosen course
We finally are sure, recourse
To second measures should not do.
To work our art upon the few
Rogue elements to whom our skill
Is useful, well, best not to kill
Time thinking. No, it’s best to act,
To jell our fictions into fact
So that the world around us knows
That we were here, and what we chose
To do, we did.” So Devlin thought . . .

How’s that for a hero urging himself to action?

It is clear from passages like this and the folkloric and epic themes that Mr. Bodkin weaves into his tale, that he has read his Odyssey and Iliad and Beowulf and uses all he learned from those great works to fashion his modern epic.

His story has young lovers, demons, evil Mages who oppress the people, a cursed prince in search of redemption and his kingdom, ogres and an ogre queen, magic trees and an ultimate fight for good and evil that (because this is a modern epic) both the hero and the heroine lead. He weaves various subplots together skillfully until they all come together in the grand tapestry of the final battle.

This work is nothing like anything else you will find. It is clearly a labor of love, and we are the beneficiaries of Mr. Bodkin’s obsession. Anyone who loves words will delight in this text.  Consider these lines, from Canticle II, Canto II, as Gudrunlod, the heroine responds to an impertinent suitor’s quip:

“At that, cap lifted in the air,
An ox he patted, stepped aside,

And cocked his eye to see how she
Responded to his throaty purr.
    “Ho sir,” she said, “how gallantly
You rescue me from, as it were,
Nothing at all, save privacy.”

I laughed out loud when I read that passage. What a triumph to manage such a succinct characterization of his heroine while doing it in rhyming verse!

I have nothing else to say but:  “Read this book!”